M12: Center Pivot
M12 presents a post-pastoral catalog of sound and vision in an experiential installation highlighting excerpts from their five-book, five-record collection of the same title. The collection unpacks M12’s approach to working in places and with people often neglected and even disdained by cosmopolitan communities. Center Pivot tackles the presentation of alternative approaches—on paper and in sound—to overcoming divergent vocabularies, reference points and politics in the rural space.

M12 is an award-winning interdisciplinary group of artists, researchers, designers, and writers based in Colorado on the American High Plains. The ever-evolving collective creates context-based art works, research projects, and education initiatives. The studio is primarily known for groundbreaking projects that explore the aesthetics of rural cultures and landscapes. Centered on context and place, M12 blends multiple fields through their connective aesthetic methodology. Locational research, design, gathering of information and construction merge, creating a layered collection of holistically organized artworks, images, publications and artifacts. The M12 group publishes works through Last Chance Press, an in-house independent press, and Jap Sam Books in The Netherlands.

30 Americans presents selections from the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida.The exhibition showcases works by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. This provocative exhibition focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture while exploring the powerful influence of artistic legacy and community across generations.
Artists whose work is represented in this sweeping survey includes icons such as Mark Bradford, Nick Cave, Robert Colescott, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

What the Kelley Collection demonstrates is how African American collectors have emerged over the last 40 years and become important forces in the art world and have an impact on the critical, curatorial, and market positions of African American artists.—Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem

Pioneering collectors Harriet and Harmon Kelley paved the way for the collection of African American art by museums and private individuals across San Antonio, Texas, and the United States. Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art illustrates the Kelley Collection’s impact on our cultural landscape by juxtaposing works from their renowned holdings with loans from the burgeoning collections of African American art of Guillermo Nicolas/Jim Foster and the McNay Art Museum. Something to Say is the first survey of modern and contemporary African American art to be presented at the McNay.

Drawn primarily from the ground-breaking collection assembled by Harriet and Harmon Kelley over nearly three decades, Something to Say presents more than 50 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs by a wide range of 20th- and 21st-century artists. Featuring masterpieces by such iconic figures as Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Horace Pippin, and Charles White, the exhibition and its related programs allow visitors to reflect upon a broad range of African American experiences, and examines the ways different African American artists have expressed personal, political, and racial identity over approximately 100 years. The exhibition empowers the visitor to appreciate multiple perspectives through various artistic expressions. Something to Say therefore exemplifies the McNay’s commitment to equity, inclusion, and social consciousness as well as artistic excellence.

Throughout the development and planning of Something to Say, the McNay has sought the insights and perspectives of many community members. The exhibition’s Community Committee includes Harriet Kelley, Guillermo Nicolas, Freda Facey, and Veronique LeMelle; additional partners across San Antonio help further inform the exhibition and promote reflection, dialogue, and creativity within the larger community.

Something to Say is organized by the McNay’s Head of Curatorial Affairs, René Paul Barilleaux. Serving as the exhibition’s curatorial advisor is Lowery Stokes Sims, a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and former chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, all in New York City. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring two seminal essays by Sims: one focused on the artworks on view and the other on the evolution of the Kelley Collection.

Between 1970 and 1975, Benny Andrews created six monumental paintings as part of his Bicentennial series in response to official United State Bicentennial plans to be carried out in 1976. The artist feared that African Americans and their contributions to American history would be defined by slavery or omitted from the narrative completely. The McNay presents the fourth work in the series, Sexism, 1973, wherein Andrews, inspired by his involvement with feminist groups and activists, explores similar oppressions of women. The work is humorous, surreal, provocative, and complex in its contemplation of the distribution of power among genders.